Old-Fashioned Pastor in a Therapy Age
Louis McBurney
January 1, 1997
If applied wisely and in partnership with Scripture, many psychological principles can lead people down discipleship's road.
—Louis McBurney
Years ago, a pastor attending Marble Retreat was trying to climb out of the deep gorge of despair. Several years before coming to Marble, she had taken her struggles to a psychotherapist and wound up in bed with him. Her troubles, as you might imagine, compounded exponentially.
In one of our first counseling sessions, I asked her what seemed like an obvious question.
"How have you dealt with your sin of adultery?"
A funny look crossed her face. "No one has ever called it that before," the pastor said. "But it is sin, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is."
Right then and there she repented. It was the catalyst to her recovery.
Later, the irony hit me: this pastor's adultery had happened several years back, but apparently nobody in her church, denomination, or circle of friends had mentioned that what she did was a sin. Neither had the professional counsel she'd received after her affair. I was flabbergasted.
The Therapeutic Invasion
The North American church has been invaded by what some call the "therapeutic culture"—a culture that promotes openness, acceptance, and tolerance, with a value system of listening, empathy, and support.
This phenomenon began in the 1960s, in what psychiatry called the Age of Anxiety. The cultural unrest of that period conceived and gave birth to despair, a despair that has continued for some thirty years. Today's lonely crowd has lost the capacity to cope. Many feel hopeless and aimless. The evening news reports the grim result: suicide, child abuse, spousal abuse, divorce, violence—the rates in recent years have skyrocketed.
Paralleling this despair has been the proliferation of ...
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